As my colleagues and I prepare for the next step in our research project ‘What’s the “Use” in Higher Education’, focussing on how the contemporary and diverse landscapes of universities conceptualise notions of ‘use’, I continue to be struck by the number of challenges facing the sector. Even more, I am fascinated by the overall apathy (some exceptions noted) concerning doing anything to overcome them even though such challenges affect all of us installed at an institution in one capacity or another.
With the residues of heady Hogmanay celebrations subsiding, and the optimism of a brand-new year surging in our breasts, perhaps we can be guided in our situation by philosophy; in this case, I suggest Kierkegaard’s prescient and scathing essay ‘The Present Age: On the death of rebellion’ (1962). In it, he decries his ‘present age’ as one of understanding without passion, publicising – and talking about – but never doing, and ‘levelling’ such that individuality becomes an exception rather than a rule. The essay is peppered with Kierkegaard’s signature sardonic commentary but is not a work of irony, although I recognise the irony of using it here as a point of reflection rather than action. I further recognise Kierkegaard’s present age to be reflective of my own, particularly regarding my experiences working in Higher Education.
‘The age of great and good actions is past, the present is the age of anticipation when even recognition is received in advance’ (Kierkegaard, 1962, p. 7).
Kierkegaard notes that in pursuit of this advance recognition, advertisement and publicity become the prevailing characteristics of his present age. Dear readers, as some of you may notice who have even the most cursory experience of browsing academic LinkedIn, this is not only relevant to the 21st century but has become one of the pressures of our present age. Kierkegaard (1962) considers the kind of showing off ubiquitous on such platforms as ‘the manifestation of emptiness’ (p. 50). Yet, the precarity of an academic career, for many early career scholars, means that they must participate in such practices as they are in continuous need of recognition and constantly concerned with what will come next. The time to do something ‘great and good’, as Kierkegaard put it, or indeed to do anything, has been lost to doing things that are small and adequate, insofar as they are income generating and publishable.
In such a climate, then, it is no wonder that passion must be set adrift to appease students, colleagues, administrators and, perhaps, politicians. Those latter two, I would suggest, are the great levellers of higher education in our present age. Levelling ‘hinders and stifles all action’ (p. 23 [original emphasis]), in contrast with the ‘setting up [of] new things and tearing down [of] old (p. 23) that one might find in a passionate age. It occurs to me that universities, as seedbeds of ideas, might well be the places where passion is nurtured; yet, there is some political backlash against this which results in administrative decisions – such as labyrinthine institutional policies and the fostering of a bureaucratic culture – ensuring that no passionate fervour in this idea remains once it has been scrutinised in triplicate by those whose main concern is how much the execution of such an idea will cost, or how much money they can hope to see in return. ‘The levelling process is … the work of reflection in the hands of an abstract power’ (p. 24), and its end lies in the dissolution of the individual. Leadership, in the institutional sense, requires the individual to level oneself to the service of levelling all others. Thus, the romantic days of the individual (in the Kierkegaardian sense of outstanding, or eccentric) academic may well be behind us.
Many of you may disagree with my suggestions here, but to those who might agree, what would be the solution? For Kierkegaard, it is to cultivate oneself as a religious individual. For me, it is difficult to offer any convincing conclusion while I remain complicit in the age of advertisement, and in the process of levelling. While entrenched in such things, I cannot suggest that other people cultivate their individuality without hypocrisy. Nevertheless, I recognise my own situation as something changeable. I can ‘tear [my]self from the coils and seductive uncertainty of reflection’ (p. 5), and from the seductive certainty of a permanent academic position, to be more openly critical of the processes that threaten the core of academia itself. Thus, the ‘use’ of Higher Education in 2026 may well lie in the capability of the sector to reflect upon itself and the potential this brings for change.
Reference
Kierkegaard, S. (1962). The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion. (A. Dru, trans.). Harper Perennial Modern Thought.
